My neighbors White and Black, The people who just came here, Or from generations back,

THE question asked of Communists more frequently than any other, if we can judge from the Hearst newspapers, is this:

“If you don’t like this country, why don’t you go back where you came from?”

The truth is, if you insist on knowing, Mr. Hearst,’ we Communists like this country very much. We cannot think of any other spot on the globe where we would rather be than exactly this one. We love our country. Our affection is all the more deep in that we have watered it with the sweat of our labor—labor which made this country what it is 5 our mothers nourished it with the tears they shed over the troubles and tragedies of rearing babies in a land controlled by profit and profit-makers. If we did not love own country so much, perhaps we would surrender it to Wall Street.

Of course, when we speak of our love of America, we mean something quite different from what Mr. Hearst is speaking about in his daily editorial diatribes. We mean that we love the masses of the toiling people. We find in these masses a great reservoir of all things admirable and lovable, all things that make life worth living. We are filled with anger when we see millions of these people whom we love being degraded, starved, oppressed, beaten and jailed when they protest. We have a deep and moving hatred of the system, and of those who fatten on the system which turns our potential paradise into a living hell.

We are determined to save our country from the hell of capitalism. And most of us were born here, so Hearst’s gag is not addressed to us anyway. But workers in America who happen to have been born abroad are just as much Americans as anybody else. We all originated across the waters, except perhaps a tiny minority of pure-blooded American Indians. The foreign-born

workers have worked harder for less wages on behalf of this country than anybody else. They deserve, at a minimum, a little courtesy from those who would speak of Americanism. There is less historical justification in America than perhaps in any other major country for that narrow nationalism, that chauvinism, which makes a cult of a “chosen people”.

We in America are a mongrel breed and we glory in it. We are the products of the melting pot of a couple of hundred nationalities. Our origin as a nation acknowledged its debt to a Polish Kosciusko, a German von Steuben, a French Lafayette and countless other “foreigners”.

Furthermore, let’s be careful not to get snooty about pedigrees j half the names in the American social register were originally borne by men who were transported from Europe after conviction of crime or who in the new country became bold bandits and buccaneers. It was the more aggressive and violent types who rose to the top most quickly in our early days and laid the foundations of the great American fortunes. They were the Al Capones of their day, with no income tax department to bring them to grief.

We love the past history of America and its masses, in spite of the Astors and Vanderbilts. We find in it a wealth of tradition striped in the purple tints of glory—the glory of men and women fighting fearlessly and self-sacrificingly against the throttling hand of a dead past, for those things upon which further progress depended.

Around the birth of our country as  an independent nation cluster such heroic names as those of Patrick Henry, whose famous shout, “As for me, give me liberty or give me death!” re-echoes down the corridors of time of Thomas Paine, whose deathless contributions to our national life of a militant anti-clericalism has long survived the many pamphlets with which he fought, the form of which alone belongs to a past age; of Thomas Jefferson, whose favorite thought revolved about watering the tree of liberty with the blood of tyrants (he thought this “natural manure” should be applied to the tree about every twenty years!) of all the founding fathers, whose chief claim to glory lies in their “treason” to the “constitutional government” of their day, and among whom the most opprobrious epithet was “loyalist”.

These men, in their own time, faced the issues of their day, cut through the red tape of precedent, legalism and constitutionalism with a sword, made a revolution, killed off a dying and outworn system, and opened up a new chapter in world history.

Our American giants of 1776 were the “international incendiaries” of their day. They inspired revolutions throughout the world. The great French Revolution, the reverberations of which filled Europe’s ears during the entire nineteenth century, took its first steps under the impulse given by the American Revolution. The Declaration of Independence was for that time what The Communist Manifesto is for ours. Copy all the most hysterical Hearst editorials of today against Moscow, Lenin, Stalin; substitute the words America, Washington, Jefferson and the result is an almost verbatim copy of the diatribes of English and European reactionary politicians in the closing years of the eighteenth century against our American founding fathers. Revolution was then “an alien doctrine imported from America” as now it is “imported from Moscow”.

After the counter-revolution engineered by Alexander Hamilton had been victorious and established itself under the Constitution in 1787, a period of reaction set in. There was, as in our modern days since the World War, a period marked by oppressive legislation which went down in history as the “Alien and Sedition Laws”. But the American masses had not been mastered those who rode high and mighty with their eighteenth-century counterparts of criminal syndicalism laws, deportations, Palmers, Dicksteins and McCormicks, were driven out of power in a struggle, often bloody and violent, which again for a period placed the representatives of the masses (then predominantly agrarian) in control of government.

The greatest figure of them all in the American tradition, Abraham Lincoln, became great because he, despite his own desire to avoid or compromise the struggle, was forced by history to lead to victory a long

and bloody civil war whose chief historical significance was the wiping out of chattel slavery, the destruction of private property rights in persons, amending the Constitution in the only way it has ever been fundamentally amended. Lincoln’s words, which still live today among the masses, are those which declared:

“This country, with its institutions, belongs to the people who inhabit it. Whenever they shall grow weary of the existing government, they can exercise their constitutional right of amending it, or their revolutionary right to dismember or overthrow it.”

These words of Lincoln are but a paraphrasing of the Declaration of Independence. Our national holiday, July 4, is in memory of that immortal document of American history. The very heart of the Declaration, that which gives it life, without which all else becomes empty phrases, are these lines, the memory of which had grown dim until the Communists rescued them from the dust of libraries:

“Whenever any form of government becomes destructive of these ends [life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness], it is the right of the people to alter or to abolish it and to institute a new government, laying its foundations on such principles and organizing its powers in such forms, as to them shall seem most likely to effect their safety and happiness. . . . When a long train of abuses and usurpations, pursuing invariably the same object, evinces a design to reduce them [the masses] under absolute despotism, it is their right, it is their duty, to throw off such government and to provide new guards for their future security.”

This is the heart of the American tradition. Without this revolutionary kernel, the whole history of the origin of our country becomes only the’ strutting of marionettes and stuffed shirts, the spread-eagle oratory of the Fourth of July under imperialism, the vulgar yappings of the Hearst press. Without this, patriotism becomes—as that acid critic of the British bourgeoisie, Dr. Johnson, described it—the last refuge of the scoundrel.

The revolutionary tradition is the heart of Americanism. That is incontestable, unless we are ready to agree that Americanism means what Hearst says slavery to outlived institutions, preservation of privilege, the degradation of the masses.

We Communists claim the revolutionary traditions of Americanism. We are the only ones who consciously continue those traditions and apply them to the problems of today.

We are the Americans and Communism is the Americanism of the twentieth century.

That does not mean, of course, that we Communists raise the slogan of “Back to 1776”. Such reactionary stupidity was committed by the LaFollette “third party” movement in 1924, typical as that movement Was of a class grouping (petty bourgeoisie refusing to ally with’ workers) that had lost its historically progressive significance. That was no more in the spirit of our revolutionary forefathers than it would have been for the Declaration of Independence to proclaim, “Back to the Republic of Rome”. To each day its own task that of 1776 was. to free a rising capitalism from the fetters of a dying feudal system, enabling it to expand the productive forces of mankind to a new high level; that of today is to free these tremendous productive forces created by capitalism, which are now being choked and destroyed because they have grown too big to live longer under capitalist property relations.

Americanism, in this revolutionary sense, means to stand in the forefront of human progress. It means never to submit to the forces of decay and death. It means constantly to free ourselves of the old, the outworn, the decaying, and to press forward to the young, the vital, the living, the expanding. It means to fight like hell against those who would plow under the crops in our fields, who would close down and scrap our factories, who would keep millions of willing toilers, anxious to create the good things of life, living like beggars upon charity.

Americanism, as we understand it, means to appropriate for our country all the best achievements of the human mind in all lands. Just as the men who wrote the Declaration of Independence had been nurtured upon the French Encyclopedists and the British classical political economists, so the men who will write our modern declaration of independence, of a dying capitalist system must feed themselves upon the teachings of Marx; Engels, Lenin and Stalin, the modern representatives of human progress.

In the words of a famous American whose memory we love, we say to Mr. Hearst and all the Red-baiting cohorts of Wall Street: “If this be treason, make the most of it.” This is how we American Communists read the history of our country. This-is what we mean by Americanism. This is how we love our country, with the same burning love which Lenin bore for Russia, his native land. Like Lenin, we will fight to free our land from the blood-sucking reactionaries, place it in the hands & of the masses, bring it into the international brotherhood of a World Union of Socialist Soviet Republics, and realize the prophetic lines of Walt Whitman: ‘We have adhered too long to petty limits . . .the time has come to enfold the world.”

The history of modern, civilised America opened with one of those great, really liberating, really revolutionary wars of which there have been so few compared to the vast number of wars of conquest which, like the present imperialist war, were caused by squabbles among kings, landowners or capitalists over the division of usurped lands or ill-gotten gains. That was the war the American people waged against the British robbers who oppressed America and held her in colonial slavery, in the same way as these “civilised” bloodsuckers are still oppressing and holding in colonial slavery hundreds of millions of people in India, Egypt, and all parts of the world.

About 150 years have passed since then. Bourgeois civilisation has borne all its luxurious fruits. America has taken first place among the free and educated nations in level of development of the productive forces of collective human endeavour, in the utilisation of machinery and of all the wonders of modern engineering. At the same time, America has become one of the foremost countries in regard to the depth of the abyss which lies between the handful of arrogant multimillionaires who wallow in filth and luxury, and the millions of working people who constantly live on the verge of pauperism. The American people, who set the world an example in waging a revolutionary war against feudal slavery, now find themselves in the latest, capitalist stage of wage-slavery to a handful of multimillionaires, and find themselves playing the role of hired thugs who, for the benefit of wealthy scoundrels, throttled the Philippines in 1898 on the pretext of “liberating” them, and are throttling the Russian Socialist Republic in 1918 on the pretext of “protecting” it from the Germans.

The four years of the imperialist slaughter of nations, however, have not passed in vain. The deception of the people by the scoundrels of both robber groups, the British and the German, has been utterly exposed by indisputable and obvious facts. The results of the four years of war have revealed the general law of capitalism as applied to war between robbers for the division of spoils: the richest and strongest profited and grabbed most, while the weakest were utterly robbed, tormented, crushed and strangled.

The British imperialist robbers were the strongest in number of “colonial slaves”. The British capitalists have not lost an inch of “their” territory (i.e., territory they have grabbed over the centuries), but they have grabbed all the German colonies in Africa, they have grabbed Mesopotamia and Palestine, they have throttled Greece, and have begun to plunder Russia.

The German imperialist robbers were the strongest in organization and discipline of “their” armies, but weaker in regard to colonies. They have lost all their colonies, but plundered half of Europe and throttled the largest number of small countries and weak nations. What a great war of “liberation” on both sides! How well the robbers of both groups, the Anglo-French and the German capitalists, together with their lackeys, the social-chauvinists, i.e., the socialists who went over to the side of “their own” bourgeoisie, have “defended their country”!

The American multimillionaires were, perhaps, richest of all, and geographically the most secure. They have profited more than all the rest. They have converted all, even the richest, countries into their tributaries. They have grabbed hundreds of billions of dollars. And every dollar is sullied with filth: the filth of the secret treaties between Britain and her “allies”, between Germany and her vassals, treaties for the division of the spoils, treaties of mutual “aid” for oppressing the workers and persecuting the internationalist socialists. Every dollar is sullied with the filth of “profitable” war contracts, which in every country made the rich richer and the poor poorer. And every dollar is stained with blood—from that ocean of blood that has been shed by the ten million killed and twenty million maimed in the great, noble, liberating and holy war to decide whether the British or the German robbers are to get most of the spoils, whether the British or the German thugs are to be foremost in throttling the weak nations all over the world.

While the German robbers broke all records in war atrocities, the British have broken all records not only in the number of colonies they have grabbed, but also in the subtlety of their disgusting hypocrisy. This very day, the Anglo-French and American bourgeois newspapers are spreading, in millions and millions of copies, lies and slander about Russia, and are hypocritically justifying their predatory expedition against her on the plea that they want to “protect” Russia from the Germans!

It does not require many words to refute this despicable and hideous lie; it is sufficient to point to one well-known fact. In October 1917, after the Russian workers had overthrown their imperialist government, the Soviet government, the government of the revolutionary workers and peasants, openly proposed a just peace, a peace without annexations or indemnities, a peace that fully guaranteed equal rights to all nations—and it proposed such a peace to all the belligerent countries.

It was the Anglo-French and the American bourgeoisie who refused to accept our proposal; it was they who even refused to talk to us about a general peace! It was they who betrayed the interests of all nations; it was they who prolonged the imperialist slaughter!

It was they who, banking on the possibility of dragging Russia back into the imperialist war, refused to take part in the peace negotiations and thereby gave a free hand to the no less predatory German capitalists who imposed the annexationist and harsh Brest Peace upon Russia!

It is difficult to imagine anything more disgusting than the hypocrisy with which the Anglo-French and American bourgeoisie are now “blaming” us for the Brest Peace Treaty. The very capitalists of those countries which could have turned the Brest negotiations into general negotiations for a general peace are now our “accusers”! The Anglo-French imperialist vultures, who have profited from the plunder of colonies and the slaughter of nations, have prolonged the war for nearly a whole year after Brest, and yet they “accuse” us, the Bolsheviks, who proposed a just peace to all countries, they accuse us, who tore up, published and exposed to public disgrace the secret, criminal treaties concluded between the ex-tzar and the Anglo-French capitalists.

The workers of the whole world, no matter in what country they live, greet us, sympathise with us, applaud us for breaking the iron ring of imperialist ties, of sordid imperialist treaties, of imperialist chains—for breaking through to freedom, and making the heaviest sacrifices in doing so—for, as a socialist republic, although torn and plundered by the imperialists, keeping out of the imperialist war and raising the banner of peace, the banner of socialism for the whole world to see.

Small wonder that the international imperialist gang hates us for this, that it “accuses” us, that all the lackeys of the imperialists, including our Right Socialist-Revolutionaries and Mensheviks, also “accuse” us. The hatred these watchdogs of imperialism express for the Bolsheviks, and the sympathy of the class-conscious workers of the world, convince us more than ever of the justice of our cause.

A real socialist would not fail to understand that for the sake of achieving victory over the bourgeoisie, for the sake of power passing to the workers, for the sake of starting the world proletarian revolution, we cannot and must not hesitate to make the heaviest sacrifices, including the sacrifice of part of our territory, the sacrifice of heavy defeats at the hands of imperialism. A real socialist would have proved by deeds his willingness for “his” country to make the greatest sacrifice to give a real push forward to the cause of the socialist revolution.

For the sake of “their” cause, that is, for the sake of winning world hegemony, the imperialists of Britain and Germany have not hesitated to utterly ruin and throttle a whole number of countries, from Belgium and Serbia to Palestine and Mesopotamia. But must socialists wait with “their” cause, the cause of liberating the working people of the whole world from the yoke of capital, of winning universal and lasting peace, until a path without sacrifice is found? Must they fear to open the battle until an easy victory is “guaranteed”? Must they place the integrity and security of “their” bourgeois-created “fatherland” above the interests of the world socialist revolution? The scoundrels in the international socialist movement who think this way, those lackeys who grovel to bourgeois morality, thrice stand condemned.

The Anglo-French and American imperialist vultures “accuse” us of concluding an “agreement” with German imperialism. What hypocrites, what scoundrels they are to slander the workers’ government while trembling because of the sympathy displayed towards us by the workers of “their own” countries! But their hypocrisy will be exposed. They pretend not to see the difference between an agreement entered into by “socialists” with the bourgeoisie (their own or foreign) against the workers, against the working people, and an agreement entered into for the protection of the workers who have defeated their bourgeoisie, with the bourgeoisie of one national colour against the bourgeoisie of another colour in order that the proletariat may take advantage of the antagonisms between the different groups of bourgeoisie.

In actual fact, every European sees this difference very well, and, as I shall show in a moment, the American people have had a particularly striking “illustration” of it in their own history. There are agreements and agreements, there are fagots et fagots, as the French say.

When in February 1918 the German imperialist vultures hurled their forces against unarmed, demobilized Russia, who had relied on the international solidarity of the proletariat before the world revolution had fully matured, I did not hesitate for a moment to enter into an “agreement” with the French monarchists. Captain Sadoul, a French army officer who, in words, sympathized with the Bolsheviks, but was in deeds a loyal and faithful servant of French imperialism, brought the French officer de Lubersac to see me. “I am a monarchist. My only aim is to secure the defeat of Germany,” de Lubersac declared to me. “That goes without saying (cela va sans dire ),” I replied. But this did not in the least prevent me from entering into an “agreement” with de Lubersac concerning certain services that French army officers, experts in explosives, were ready to render us by blowing up railway lines in order to hinder the German invasion. This is an example of an “agreement” of which every class-conscious worker will approve, an agreement in the interests of socialism. The French monarchist and I shook hands, although we knew that each of us would willingly hang his “partner”. But for a time our interests coincided. Against the advancing rapacious Germans, we, in the interests of the Russian and the world socialist revolution, utilized the equally rapacious counter-interests of other imperialists. In this way we served the interests of the working class of Russia and of other countries, we strengthened the proletariat and weakened the bourgeoisie of the whole world, we resorted to the methods, most legitimate and essential in every war, of manoeuvre, stratagem, retreat, in anticipation of the moment when the rapidly maturing proletarian revolution in a number of advanced countries completely matured.

However much the Anglo-French and American imperialist sharks fume with rage, however much they slander us, no matter how many millions they spend on bribing the Right Socialist-Revolutionary, Menshevik and other social-patriotic newspapers, I shall not hesitate one second to enter into a similar “agreement” with the German imperialist vultures if an attack upon Russia by Anglo-French troops calls for it. And I know perfectly well that my tactics will be approved by the class-conscious proletariat of Russia, Germany, France, Britain, America—in short, of the whole civilized world. Such tactics will ease the task of the socialist revolution, will hasten it, will weaken the international bourgeoisie, will strengthen the position of the working class which is defeating the bourgeoisie.

The American people resorted to these tactics long ago to the advantage of their revolution. When they waged their great war of liberation against the British oppressors, they had also against them the French and the Spanish oppressors who owned a part of what is now the United States of North America. In their arduous war for freedom, the American people also entered into “agreements” with some oppressors against others for the purpose of weakening the oppressors and strengthening those who were fighting in a revolutionary manner against oppression, for the purpose of serving the interests of the oppressed people. The American people took advantage of the strife between the French, the Spanish and the British; sometimes they even fought side by side with the forces of the French and Spanish oppressors against the British oppressors; first they defeated the British and then freed themselves (partly by ransom) from the French and the Spanish.

Historical action is not the pavement of Nevsky Prospekt, said the great Russian revolutionary Chernyshevsky. A revolutionary would not “agree” to a proletarian revolution only “on the condition” that it proceeds easily and smoothly, that there is, from the outset, combined action on the part of the proletarians of different countries, that there are guarantees against defeats, that the road of the revolution is broad, free and straight, that it will not be necessary during the march to victory to sustain the heaviest casualties, to “bide one’s time in a besieged fortress”, or to make one’s way along extremely narrow, impassable, winding and dangerous mountain tracks. Such a person is no revolutionary, he has not freed himself from the pedantry of the bourgeois intellectuals; such a person will be found constantly slipping into the camp of the counter-revolutionary bourgeoisie, like our Right Socialist-Revolutionaries, Mensheviks and even (although more rarely) Left Socialist-Revolutionaries.

Echoing the bourgeoisie, these gentlemen like to blame us for the “chaos” of the revolution, for the “destruction” of industry, for the unemployment and the food shortage. How hypocritical these accusations are, coming from those who welcomed and supported the imperialist war, or who entered into an “agreement” with Kerensky who continued this war! It is this imperialist war that is the cause of all these misfortunes. The revolution engendered by the war can not avoid the terrible difficulties and suffering bequeathed it by the prolonged, ruinous, reactionary slaughter of the nations. To blame us for the “destruction” of industry, or for the “terror”, is either hypocrisy or dull-witted pedantry; it reveals an inability to understand the basic conditions of the fierce class struggle, raised to the highest degree of intensity that is called revolution.

Even when “accusers” of this type do “recognise” the class struggle, they limit themselves to verbal recognition; actually, they constantly slip into the philistine utopia of class “agreement” and “collaboration”; for in revolutionary epochs the class struggle has always, inevitably, and in every country, assumed the form of civil war, and civil war is inconceivable without the severest destruction, terror and the restriction of formal democracy in the interests of this war. Only unctuous parsons—whether Christian or “secular” in the persons of parlour, parliamentary socialists— cannot see, understand and feel this necessity. Only a life less “man in the muffler” can shun the revolution for this reason instead of plunging into battle with the utmost ardour and determination at a time when history demands that the greatest problems of humanity be solved by struggle and war.

The American people have a revolutionary tradition which has been adopted by the best representatives of the American proletariat, who have repeatedly expressed their complete solidarity with us Bolsheviks. That tradition is the war of liberation against the British in the eighteenth century and the Civil War in the nineteenth century. In some respects, if we only take into consideration the “destruction” of some branches of industry and of the national economy, America in 1870 was behind 1860. But what a pedant, what an idiot would anyone be to deny on these grounds the immense, world-historic, progressive and revolutionary significance of the American Civil War of 1863-65!

The representatives of the bourgeoisie understand that for the sake of overthrowing Negro slavery, of overthrowing the rule of the slaveowners, it was worth letting the country go through long years of civil war, through the abysmal ruin, destruction and terror that accompany every war. But now, when we are confronted with the vastly greater task of overthrowing capitalist wage-slavery, of overthrowing the rule of the bourgeoisie—now, the representatives and defenders of the bourgeoisie, and also the reformist socialists who have been frightened by the bourgeoisie and are shunning the revolution, cannot and do not want to understand that civil war is necessary and legitimate.

The American workers will not follow the bourgeoisie. They will be with us, for civil war against the bourgeoisie. The whole history of the world and of the American labour movement strengthens my conviction that this is so. I also recall the words of one of the most beloved leaders of the American proletariat, Eugene Debs, who wrote in the Appeal to Reason, I believe towards the end of 1915, in the article “What Shall I Fight For” (I quoted this article at the beginning of 1916 at a public meeting of workers in Berne, Switzerland)—that he, Debs, would rather be shot than vote credits for the present criminal and reactionary war; that he, Debs, knows of only one holy and, from the proletarian standpoint, legitimate war, namely: the war against the capitalists, the war to liberate mankind from wage-slavery.

I am not surprised that Wilson, the head of the American multimillionaires and servant of the capitalist sharks, has thrown Debs into prison. Let the bourgeoisie be brutal to the true internationalists, to the true representatives of the revolutionary proletariat! The more fierce and brutal they are, the nearer the day of the victorious proletarian revolution.

We are blamed for the destruction caused by our revolution. . . . Who are the accusers? The hangers-on of the bourgeoisie, of that very bourgeoisie who, during the four years of the imperialist war, have destroyed almost the whole of European culture and have reduced Europe to barbarism, brutality and starvation. These bourgeoisie now demand we should not make a revolution on these ruins, amidst this wreckage of culture, amidst the wreckage and ruins created by the war, nor with the people who have been brutalized by the war. How humane and righteous the bourgeoisie are!

Their servants accuse us of resorting to terror. . . . The British bourgeoisie have forgotten their 1649, the French bourgeoisie have forgotten their 1793. Terror was just and legitimate when the bourgeoisie resorted to it for their own benefit against feudalism. Terror became monstrous and criminal when the workers and poor peasants dared to use it against the bourgeoisie! Terror was just and legitimate when used for the purpose of substituting one exploiting minority for another exploiting minority. Terror became monstrous and criminal when it began to be used for the purpose of overthrowing every exploiting minority, to be used in the interests of the vast actual majority, in the interests of the proletariat and semi-proletariat, the working class and the poor peasants!

The international imperialist bourgeoisie have slaughtered ten million men and maimed twenty million in “their” war, the war to decide whether the British or the German vultures are to rule the world.

If our war, the war of the oppressed and exploited against the oppressors and the exploiters, results in half a million or a million casualties in all countries, the bourgeoisie will say that the former casualties are justified, while the latter are criminal.

The proletariat will have something entirely different to say.

Now, amidst the horrors of the imperialist war, the proletariat is receiving a most vivid and striking illustration of the great truth taught by all revolutions and bequeathed to the workers by their best teachers, the founders of modern socialism. This truth is that no revolution can be successful unless the resistance of the exploiters is crushed. When we, the workers and toiling peasants, captured state power, it became our duty to crush the resistance of the exploiters. We are proud we have been doing this. We regret we are not doing it with sufficient firmness and determination.

We know that fierce resistance to the socialist revolution on the part of the bourgeoisie is inevitable in all countries, and that this resistance will grow with the growth of this revolution. The proletariat will crush this resistance; during the struggle against the resisting bourgeoisie it will finally mature for victory and for power.

Let the corrupt bourgeois press shout to the whole world about every mistake our revolution makes. We are not daunted by our mistakes. People have not become saints because the revolution has begun. The toiling classes who for centuries have been oppressed, downtrodden and forcibly held in the vice of poverty, brutality and ignorance cannot avoid mistakes when making a revolution. And, as I pointed out once before, the corpse of bourgeois society cannot be nailed in a coffin and buried.[*] The corpse of capitalism is decaying and disintegrating in our midst, polluting the air and poisoning our lives, enmeshing that which is new, fresh, young and virile in thousands of threads and bonds of that which is old, moribund and decaying.

For every hundred mistakes we commit, and which the bourgeoisie and their lackeys (including our own Mensheviks and Right Socialist-Revolutionaries) shout about to the whole world, 10,000 great and heroic deeds are performed, greater and more heroic because they are simple and inconspicuous amidst the everyday life of a factory district or a remote village, performed by people who are not accustomed (and have no opportunity) to shout to the whole world about their successes.

But even if the contrary were true—although I know such an assumption is wrong—even if we committed 10,000 mistake for every 100 correct actions we performed, even in that case our revolution would be great and invincible, and so it will be in the eyes of world history, because, for the first time, not the minority, not the rich alone, not the educated alone, but the real people, the vast majority of the working people, are themselves building a new life, are by their own experience solving the most difficult problems of socialist organization .

Every mistake committed in the course of such work, in the course of this most conscientious and earnest work of tens of millions of simple workers and peasants in reorganizing their whole life, every such mistake is worth thousands and millions of “lawless” successes achieved by the exploiting minority—successes in swindling and duping the working people. For only through such mistakes will the workers and peasants learn to build the new life, learn to do without capitalists; only in this way will they hack a path for themselves—through thousands of obstacles—to victorious socialism.

Mistakes are being committed in the course of their revolutionary work by our peasants, who at one stroke, in one night, October 25-26 (old style), 1917, entirely abolished the private ownership of land, and are now, month after month, overcoming tremendous difficulties and correcting their mistakes themselves, solving in a practical way the most difficult tasks of organising new conditions of economic life, of fighting the kulaks, providing land for the working people (and not for the rich), and of changing to communist large-scale agriculture.

Mistakes are being committed in the course of their revolutionary work by our workers, who have already, after a few months, nationalized almost all the biggest factories and plants, and are learning by hard, everyday work the new task of managing whole branches of industry, are setting the nationalized enterprises going, overcoming the powerful resistance of inertia, petty-bourgeois mentality and selfishness, and, brick by brick, are laying the foundation of new social ties, of a new labour discipline, of a new influence of the workers’ trade unions over their members.

Mistakes are committed in the course of their revolutionary work by our Soviets, which were created as far back as 1905 by a mighty upsurge of the people. The Soviets of Workers and Peasants are a new type of state, a new and higher type of democracy, a form of the proletarian dictatorship, a means of administering the state without the bourgeoisie and against the bourgeoisie. For the first time democracy is here serving the people, the working people, and has ceased to be democracy for the rich as it still is in all bourgeois republics, even the most democratic. For the first time, the people are grappling, on a scale involving one hundred million, with the problem of implementing the dictatorship of the proletariat and semi-proletariat—a problem which, if not solved, makes socialism out of the question.

Let the pedants, or the people whose minds are incurably stuffed with bourgeois-democratic or parliamentary prejudices, shake their heads in perplexity about our Soviets, about the absence of direct elections, for example. These people have forgotten nothing and have learned nothing during the period of the great upheavals of 1914-18. The combination of the proletarian dictatorship with the new democracy for the working people—of civil war with the widest participation of the people in politics—such a combination cannot be brought about at one stroke, nor does it fit in with the outworn modes of routine parliamentary democracy. The contours of a new world, the world of socialism, are rising before us in the shape of the Soviet Republic. It is not surprising that this world does not come into being ready-made, does not spring forth like Minerva from the head of Jupiter.

The old bourgeois-democratic constitutions waxed eloquent about formal equality and right of assembly; but our proletarian and peasant Soviet Constitution casts aside the hypocrisy of formal equality. When the bourgeois republicans overturned thrones they did not worry about formal equality between monarchists and republicans. When it is a matter of overthrowing the bourgeoisie, only traitors or idiots can demand formal equality of rights for the bourgeoisie. “Freedom of assembly” for workers and peasants is not worth a farthing when the best buildings belong to the bourgeoisie. Our Soviets have confiscated all the good buildings in town and country from the rich and have transferred all of them to the workers and peasants for their unions and meetings. This is our freedom of assembly—for the working people! This is the meaning and content of our Soviet, our socialist Constitution!

That is why we are all so firmly convinced that no matter what misfortunes may still be in store for it, our Republic of Soviets is invincible.

It is invincible because every blow struck by frenzied imperialism, every defeat the international bourgeoisie inflict on us, rouses more and more sections of the workers and peasants to the struggle, teaches them at the cost of enormous sacrifice, steels them and engenders new heroism on a mass scale.

We know that help from you will probably not come soon, comrade American workers, for the revolution is developing in different countries in different forms and at different tempos (and it cannot be otherwise). We know that although the European proletarian revolution has been maturing very rapidly lately, it may, after all, not flare up within the next few weeks. We are banking on the inevitability of the world revolution, but this does not mean that we are such fools as to bank on the revolution inevitably coming on a definite and early date. We have seen two great revolutions in our country, 1905 and 1917, and we know revolutions are not made to order, or by agreement. We know that circumstances brought our Russian detachment of the socialist proletariat to the fore not because of our merits, but because of the exceptional backwardness of Russia, and that before the world revolution breaks out a number of separate revolutions may be defeated.

In spite of this, we are firmly convinced that we are invincible, because the spirit of mankind will not be broken by the imperialist slaughter. Mankind will vanquish it. And the first country to break the convict chains of the imperialist war was our country. We sustained enormously heavy casualties in the struggle to break these chains, but we broke them. We are free from imperialist dependence, we have raised the banner of struggle for the complete overthrow of imperialism for the whole world to see.

We are now, as it were, in a besieged fortress, waiting for the other detachments of the world socialist revolution to come to our relief. These detachments exist, they are more numerous than ours, they are maturing, growing, gaining more strength the longer the brutalities of imperialism continue. The workers are breaking away from their social traitors—the Gomperses, Hendersons, Renaudels, Scheidemanns and Renners. Slowly but surely the workers are adopting communist, Bolshevik tactics and are marching towards the proletarian revolution, which alone is capable of saving dying culture and dying mankind.

In short, we are invincible, because the world proletarian revolution is invincible.

Comrade Gus Hall analyzed some of the elements indicating a mass breakaway from the old parties in his report to the post-election November 1976 meeting of the Central Committee of the Communist Party. He then said:

Growing Disaffection 

Is there an objective basis for initiatives in the direction of a new, mass anti-monopoly party?

Nationally, it is increasingly obvious that despite President Jimmy Carter’s standing in the polls, there is a swelling current of disenchantment with him, particularly among those who voted for him as “the lesser evil” and whose expectations he aroused. Evidence on this score piles up daily:

• In the ranks of organized labor there developed early considerable criticism of the Carter Administration’s refusal to support its demand for a $3 hourly minimum wage and of Carter’s miserly counter-proposals.
  Similarly, many trade unionists are bitter about the Administration’s failure to make real efforts to win passage of the situs picketing bill, long a demand of the building trades unions. Further, there is considerable resentment at the Administration for putting on ice any repealer of Section 14B of the Taft Hartley law, which legalizes the so-called right-to-work law, the notorious measure used, particularly in the South, to strangle the union shop and, indeed, union organization. This resentment continues to exist in the labor movement, notwithstanding the maneuvering of AFL-CIO President George Meany to patch up matters with Carter. If anything, the placid acceptance by Carter of a high level of unemployment for years to come has solidified a critical attitude toward him in labor’s ranks. The issue of jobs has become the number one question for organized labor, as it has for unorganized workers. Even Meany, feeling the pressure from the ranks, has had to attack Carter publicly for stressing “balancing the budget” as against jobs for the jobless.
• In the Black people’s movement there is a tidal wave of discontent with the Carter Administration. It reached something of a peak in late August with an extraordinary “summit meeting” of representatives of 15 leading organizations of Black people, including the Congressional Black Caucus. Earlier, there were expressions of criticism at the NAACP national convention by Vernon E. Jordan, Jr., executive director of the National Urban League; by the Rev. Jesse L. Jackson, head of PUSH (People United to Save Humanity), and by others.
  But the summit session had a qualitatively new character. There was an evident shattering of illusions and the emergence of a common strategy for a counter-offensive against what the Rev. Jackson called “the callous neglect” by the Carter Administration of the Blacks and the poor generally. The central aim, the summit agreed, was the fight for jobs, for a full employment policy, with special emphasis on jobs for the Black youth, among whom unemployment ranges up to 86 percent, according to some estimates.
  This criticism of Carter from wide sections of the Black community, cutting across ideological and organization lines, is tinged with a special bitterness. The Black people feel — and this is supported by the election figures — that they, plus some sections of labor, provided the margin of Carter’s narrow election victory over Republican Gerald Ford. There is a deep feeling that Carter betrayed his campaign promises, especially in respect to the bread and-butter issues. Significantly, Carter, who earlier had referred to Jordan’s criticism as “demagogic,” talked differently after the summit meeting. The White House response, according to Jody Powell, Carter’s press secretary, “ought to be moderate and responsible.” Subsequently, Carter met with the House Black Caucus.
• Among liberal Democrats there is also disillusionment, reflected most clearly by the sharply critical speech of Senator George McGovern at this year’s convention of Americans for Democratic Action. McGovern and other liberal Democrats are attacking Carter not only for reneging on his campaign pledges but also for refusing to fight for his own measures when the political going gets rough. For example, the Administration sponsored a universal voter registration measure, the effect of which would be to simplify procedures, thus increasing the number of people who actually vote. (Such a law is on the statute books of Minnesota and Wisconsin and has in fact raised the total percentage of voters beyond that of the other states.) However, the Administration backed away from its own bill, a simple democratic measure, after the Republican high command and some Southern Democratic Senators emitted a few growls. 

Neutron Bomb and L’Affair Lance 

Likewise, criticism of Carter’s betrayal of his pledge to cut the military budget has surfaced along with expressions of outrage at the proposal to build the neutron bomb (“spare the property and kill the people”). The giant American Federation of State, County and Municipal Workers (AFSCME), which supported him in the 1976 campaign, waged an effective drive against the B-l bomber, undoubtedly a factor in the decision to halt it. Opposition to the neutron bomb is widespread, even in circles which rarely speak up on such questions. Thus, for instance, the National Coalition of American Nuns, according to the lay Catholic magazine Commonwealth, wrote Carter:

Nor does this exhaust the issues around which there is discontent. Carter’s stalling on a national health bill has evoked criticism among people who were his 1976 supporters. And even his high-pressure “human rights” campaign has met with considerable skepticism, with more than one commentator noting acidly that Carter exempts such tyrannies as South Korea and Iran for reasons of alleged “national security.”

Beyond these clearly defined groupings of labor, the Black people’s organizations and liberal Democrats, the Bert Lance scandal has set off widespread comment about “cronyism” in the White House. Carter’s defense of his old Georgia pal and appointee to the key post of director of the Office of Management and Budget in the face of the evidence of the latter’s financial shenanigans as banker politician drew attacks from many quarters, including some old southern supporters. The sharp contrast between Carter’s sanctimonious pre-election preachments and his behavior in L’Affaire Lance is widely noted. Some columnists have even hinted that Carter’s election campaign may have been partially financed through Lance’s curious fiscal didoes.

Not all the discontent is aimed at Washington, however. In city after city there are local struggles around cutbacks of social services, layoffs of municipal workers and the perennial City Hall scandals. New York City is the most dramatic example, but the situation is virtually epidemic since the urban areas have borne the main shock of the banker and monopoly drive to lower the living standards of the people. 

Developments Toward Independence 

How is all this affecting the electoral process?

It has been noted for some time that there has been a steady alienation of the electorate from the process. Nearly half the eligible voters did not participate in the 1976 elections (less than 54 per cent) and the curve has been generally downward since 1960 when about 60 percent voted in the presidential elections.

Nor is 1977 showing much change, judging by the municipal primaries which with rare exceptions — New York City — continued to indicate wide disinterest in the selection of candidates by the old parties.

Among those who do take part in the electoral process there is mounting evidence of independence from the two old parties. For example, of 2,150 candidates whose names appeared on a primary and/or a general election ballot for the House of Representatives or Senate in 1976, 13 per cent (about 280) were independents, that is, they ran either without a party designation or as minor party candidates. (By no means, however, should all these be regarded as progressive candidates. Some of these “independents” were clearly ultra-Rightists.)

Independence among the registered voters, in the sense of non-affiliation with either of the two old parties, continues to grow. The New York State Board of Elections reported recently that the number of independents had passed beyond the 1 million mark for the first time in the state’s history. In varying degree, the same trend is apparent in other states.

But this phenomenon, while reflecting a lack of enthusiasm for either old party, is not yet true independence, that is, a break with the two old parties. Most of those who decline to enroll themselves as either Republicans or Democrats are generally “swing” voters. They say they vote “the candidate, not the party.” Frequently, it means shuttling between the two old parties and “splitting” their tickets between candidates of both.

Evidence of this shuttling was seen even in the first months of the Carter Administration. In the special election in Washington State’s 7^th Congressional District to replace Rep. Brock Adams, a Democrat appointed Secretary of Transportation, a Republican won in this traditionally Democratic area. Reportedly, Carter’s threat of a gasoline tax was a major issue in the election. Most of the voters, reflecting a widespread anti-monopoly mood, regarded the tax as a ripoff designed to benefit the oil trusts and voted accordingly. They switched to the GOP to register their protest, apparently because they saw no viable alternative. (Significantly, the three byelections since Carter’s inauguration in January have all seen Democratic candidates defeated, the last being in a rock-ribbed Democratic district in Louisiana.)

What can be expected in the organized labor movement in respect to political action?

Within the labor movement some degree of change can be anticipated, particularly if the United Auto Workers union votes to re-affiliate to the AFL-CIO. The UAW and the new leadership of the Machinists union, together with the Communication Workers, AFSCME and the other unions which opposed George Meany’s “neutrality” in the Nixon-McGovern race of 1972 (and even formed their own committee) will tend to group together again. These unions tend to be critical of the Carter Administration. Some see the necessity of forming a political pressure bloc. But it will be a bloc within the general administration orbit, a bloc to the Left of Meany and the Administration, designed largely to offset pressures from the Right. It should have a limited usefulness in checking anti-labor legislation and advancing social welfare and civil rights measures and perhaps even supporting some liberal moves in foreign policy.

But, soberly viewed, all this is a considerable way from a new people’s anti-monopoly party, although it cannot be ruled out that one or another labor leader, under pressure from the rank and file, may become associated with a movement for a mass people’s party.

It must be concluded at this moment that while there is considerable ferment in the country and disenchantment with the two old parties, this does not yet spell out a solid national movement for a new mass, anti-monopoly party. There are a few local coalitions that are promising but a national movement along these lines does not exist today. In this respect the situation is considerably different than that preceding the 1948 election when the Progressive Party fielded a third party presidential ticket headed by Henry Wallace. In late 1946 and throughout 1947 there was active agitation and organization on a nation-wide scale for such a national ticket, all of it laying the groundwork for the 1948 presidential campaign. In the 1976 election campaign the question of building a mass anti-monopoly party was raised in the speeches of Gus Hall and Jarvis Tyner, the Communist candidates for President and Vice President, respectively. While mass reaction was friendly to the idea, few public figures other than Hall and Tyner chose to discuss the question. 

Needed: Ongoing Grassroots Work 

Clearly, ferment and disenchantment may create a political climate in which a new mass party can be built but no more than that. The actual process — and the term process must be stressed — by which such a party will be built in the U.S. is exceedingly complex. It of course requires constant agitation for such a party but it will not be built by ringing rhetoric calling for masses of voters to leave the two old parties.

Experience over the years demonstrates that effective third parties grow out of mass movements on great social issues. Thus, the Republican party of the mid-19^th century arose out of the struggle around For Peace, Jobs, Equality chattel slavery. The LaFollette presidential candidacy of 1924 on the Progressive Party line had as its basis the struggle of the trade union movement against the post-World War I anti-labor drive, as well as the revolt of the small farmers against monopoly. The Progressive Party of 1948 arose primarily in the struggle against the cold war.

From this it follows that a new mass people’s party can arise today only through the participation of masses in the main economic and political struggles of the day — for jobs and wage increases, against monopoly prices and extortionate utility rates, for rent control and public housing, against cutbacks of social services, against the swollen military budget and for nuclear disarmament. A special element of today’s struggle must be the fight against pervasive racism and the systematic effort to destroy the gains made in the civil rights battles of the ’60s. The totality of all this is a many-sided struggle against monopoly capital.

But even participation in struggle, while basic, is of itself not enough. Millions have participated in economic and political struggles in the past but have not drawn the conclusion of the need for a break with the two-party system. In short, there is nothing automatic about the birth of a new mass united front anti-monopoly party. The conscious element is decisive, given the movement of millions in struggle.

What is required is concrete work for such a party on many levels, starting at the grassroots with legislative and political activity that stems from and is fused with the struggles around day-to-day issues. This work — on a 365-days-a-year basis — must have as one of its major objectives the building of independent coalition movements around labor candidates, Black candidates, candidates of other national groups, women candidates, youth candidates — in short, candidates standing on a platform of united anti-monopoly struggle. There will be no mass anti-monopoly party in the field in the 1980 presidential elections unless solid grassroots bases are built in 1977, 1978 and 1979. 

United Front Approach 

It is true that only a relative minority of those involved in grassroots coalitions will have the outlook of a formal breakaway from the two old parties. Many will retain some old party ties. Many will continue to participate in old party primaries even as they express increasing independence on issues and help to build independent movements. That means that the forces committed to seeking a genuine political alternative cannot ignore the old party primaries. These primaries can sometimes become the arenas of struggle around issues that are part of the process of building a new anti-monopoly party.

It should be remembered that progressive congressmen like John Conyers and Ron Dellums, for example, while taking advanced positions and increasingly associating themselves with independent forces, still feel it necessary to use the Democratic Party locally as a political vehicle. Nor can we forget political history. The late Vito Marcantonio, probably the most progressive congressman of this century, began as a Republican and used the Republican ballot line as a vehicle. At the same time he was building up an independent apparatus and advancing an independent progressive program, remaining a nominal Republican until the American Labor Party of the 1930’s developed as a balance-of-power party in New York State.

There will undoubtedly be similar developments along the road to a new mass people’s party today. Committed third party forces may find themselves in grassroots political coalitions with supporters of Jimmy Carter. They may find themselves working for independent local candidates who on a national level back the Carter Administration. This is an inevitable element of any genuine mass united front anti monopoly movement.

This was the case in the superb Mark Allen campaign in Berkeley last Spring, a non-partisan election for local office in which a splendid united front of struggle was built, a united front in which the non-Communist participants (the majority) were regarded — and felt themselves — as equals in the united front. Great credit goes to those who understood and correctly applied these united front policies, particularly to Mark Allen, a candidate in the great tradition of Communist Councilman Pete Cacchione and Ben Davis, and also to the leadership of the California Communist Party.

On a somewhat different level is New York, where the Coalition for Independent Politics is slowly building a movement that includes people who are prepared to accept a progressive program but still regard the Democratic primary as an indispensable element of their campaigns. And in Connecticut, a citizens’ group for independent political action, including labor people, Black leaders and community activists, has been convoked.

Similar situations exist, perhaps only in embryos, in other areas. Tactical elements will vary from state to state but the essential strategic task remains the same — the gathering of the forces moving in the direction of independent progressive political action.

But perhaps a word of warning would not be out of order. Day-to-day organization is required but it must be pervaded by the underlying concept that the building of an effective anti-monopoly movement and party is the next great task on the agenda of the working class and its allies. It is a historic struggle for democracy and will be bitterly resisted by the ruling class. It is a massive undertaking, greater even than the battle for the organization of the unorganized workers into industrial unions in the 30s and 40s. Already we see efforts in some states to tighten further the already restrictive election laws and limit access to the ballot for independents and minority parties.

But a mighty people’s movement can overcome these obstacles. Uniting the great majority who are the victims of monopoly capital, it can sweep aside the ruling class barriers and move towards the formation of a mass anti-monopoly people’s party that will effectively challenge the two old parties of capitalism.

1. Adapted (and updated) from remarks delivered to a meeting of the Communist Party Central Committee and National Council, May 30, 1977. ︎
2. Hall, Gus, The 1976 Elections — Mandate for Struggle; New Outlook Publishers: New York, 1976, pp. 13-14. ︎
3. Commonweal, August 19, 1977. ︎

Three years have passed since the Emergency National Convention. Looking back on that Convention from the vantage point of 1948, the entire Party can more easily grasp the full historic significance of its decisions. The Emergency Convention rejected Browder’s non-existent “progressive imperialism” and utopia of “class peace”; restored to the Party its Marxist-Leninist science, the priceless heritage of working-class theory and practice; and armed it for the struggles of the real postwar world.

The fight for the reconstitution of the Party as the Marxist vanguard of the American working class was carried through under the most difficult conditions.

The most ferocious attacks against our Party have spearheaded Wall Street’s offensive against the economic and political rights of labor and the people and its drive toward war and fascism. Here as everywhere anti-Communism is the hallmark of reaction and fascism. In our country, as formerly in Hitler-Germany, anti-Communism seeks to screen the imperialist and pro-fascist aims of reaction from the people.

In these past three years the Party has been forced to defend itself on many fronts. It has been threatened by a multitude of repressive measures, in the state legislatures and city councils, as well as in Congress. Communist leaders have been subjected to persecution, court prosecution, threats of imprisonment, and imprisonment.

Truman’s “loyalty order” bars Communists from Federal employment—and this infamous blacklist is being extended to private industry, the schools and colleges.

The anti-Communist provisions of the Taft-Hartley Law handicap not only the work of Communist trade unionists but that of all progressive unionists, thereby weakening all organized labor.

Foreign-born workers, Communist and non-Communist, have been harassed, denied the right to citizenship, arrested, and threatened with deportation. Already five members of our outgoing National Committee are faced with the threat of deportation, Comrades Williamson, Stachel, Bittelman, Jones and Potash.

The House Un-American Committee, which has fomented the most vicious anti-Communist hysteria, has become one of the major instrumentalities in the attempt of reaction to impose a fascist, militarist state upon our country.

The monopoly-controlled press, radio, and movies constantly bombard the American people with anti-Communist venom. Day in and day out, they lie and slander, deliberately, when they label Communists as “red-fascists, Communazis, spies, saboteurs, and foreign agents.” They deliberately lie and slander when they charge that Communists are “advocates of force and violence to overthrow the government of the United States.”

Our Party has confronted many obstacles in its efforts to counteract these Hitlerite lies with the truth. The commercial channels of communication are being denied our Party. Storm-troop violence is increasingly being unleashed against our members, our public meetings and the canvassers of our press.

We do not minimize the extent to which anti-Communist prejudices have penetrated sections of the labor movement and the American people. But we also see that the American working class and people are resisting the unprecedented effort to stampede them into the surrender of their gains and rights in this atmosphere of anti-Communist hysteria. Our Party can take pride in the tireless work of our membership and leadership to arouse the working people in the fight to block these plans of reaction.

The appearance of Comrade Dennis before the House Un-American Committee in March, 1947, despite the Committee’s refusal to hear his testimony, did much to inspire the Party and arouse the people for action against the Sheppard-Rankin Bill.

The earlier testimony of Comrades William Z. Foster and Ben Davis before the Un-American Committee transformed the hearing into a counter-attack against the un-Americans. Comrade Davis appeared before the Committee again in February, 1948, to expose the trickery of the “registration” proposals through which the Thomas-Rankin group is seeking to outlaw the Party and nullify the Bill of Rights.

The Fight Against the Outlawing of Our Party

A high point of Party activity was reached in the Spring of 1947, at the time when the late Secretary of Labor Schwellenbach, proposed the outlawing of the Party. In answer to this attack our Party raised a fighting fund of $250,000 in less than 25 days. In fact, more than $1,000,000 was actually raised by the Districts. In the months of March and April the Party reached 10,000,000 Americans through numerous advertisements in national newspapers, including trade-union, Negro and national group papers, as well as the big metropolitan press and liberal weeklies.

At the same time, despite many refusals, the Party reached the radio audience through no broadcasts—most of them organized locally. Comrades Foster and Dennis spoke on national hook-ups, and recordings of their speeches were made available for re-broadcast in the Districts. Literally millions of leaflets were issued by clubs, sections, counties, and districts. As a result of this activity, broad sections of the people rallied to the Party’s defense, and numerous individuals and organizations issued public statements. The popular response to the Party’s call in defense of the Bill of Rights killed the Schwellenbach proposal and upset reaction’s time-table.

The Mundt-Nixon Bill, sponsored by the House un-Americans in 1948, had wider support in Congress, in Administration circles, and in various organizations. This offered a more serious threat to the democratic rights of our Party, to the labor movement, and other progressive organizations.

There were some people in trade-union and liberal circles who, overwhelmed with a sense of defeatism, felt that the fight was over and that “nothing could be done.” But the sounding of the alarm by our Party and its appeal to labor and to all democratic-minded Americans, irrespective of their stand on Communism, to enlist in an all-out fight to defeat the Mundt-Nixon Bill, evoked a wide response. This appeal, issued by Comrades Foster and Dennis, was sent to every international union and national people’s organization and was circulated locally to civic, fraternal, political, and religious groups. Despite the denial of press and radio to our Party’s statements, we were able to rally popular opposition which assumed wide proportions.

The appearance of Comrades Foster and Gates at the Senate Committee hearing resulted in the exposure of the true nature of the Bill through a brilliant defense of the position of our Party. The fight for radio time resulted in the Foster-Mundt debate which reached millions.

Our Party again appealed for a $500,000 fund to fight the Mundt Bill, and the membership responded, even though it had just carried through the Party-Press Fighting Fund Drive. This activity broke through the attempted conspiracy of silence. Local after local, as well as central trades councils, in the A. F. of L.; city C.I.O. bodies; Railroad Brotherhood unions; and many international unions, both A. F. of L. and C.I.O., came out in opposition to the Bill. Even William Green and Philip Murray sent private letters to the Committee protesting the unconstitutionality of the Bill. Church groups, such as Northern and Southern Baptists, Presbyterians, and Methodists, and even isolated Catholic voices, joined the anti-Mundt Bill fight. And Washington saw an inspiring demonstration of more than 6,000 representative men and women converge upon it to defend the Bill of Rights. The call of our clubs—“Every man at his post”—witnessed the greatest activity of our membership in many a year. As is known, at the regular session of Congress, the Mundt-Nixon Bill was buried in the Senate Judiciary Committee. Reaction’s time-table was again upset.

During this entire period, locally and nationally, the Party has been involved in numerous court cases requiring legal defense of the Party leaders and members. The case of Comrade Dennis, whose conviction for contempt of the Un-American Committee and one year jail sentence is now being appealed, presents a basic challenge to the constitutionality of the House Un-American Committee. The Party takes pride in the fact that Comrade Dennis, in defending his personal liberty and the democratic rights of the Party, also converted his case into a weapon for striking a blow against the national oppression of the Negro people. His firm stand that John Rankin sits in Congress in violation of the 14^th Amendment has won wide support among all sections of the Negro people.

A significant victory was won in the fight for release on bail of the five hunger strikers, held in Tom Clark’s Ellis Island concentration camp. The Party expresses special pride in the political initiative of Comrades John Williamson and Irving Potash, members of the outgoing National Board, and of the staunch German Communist leader, Gerhart Eisler.

The attacks on our Party have not ceased. Having failed so far, the enemy now resorts to new plots in its frenzy to outlaw the Communist Party. The “Special Grand Jury” which labored nearly a year and a half to prove a non-existent “foreign agent conspiracy” gave birth to the present monstrous frame-up indictments of the twelve members of the outgoing National Board. This is the most serious attempt yet to outlaw the Communist Party. Should the enemy succeed in this frame-up, it will mean more than the imprisonment of the members of the National Board. For, involved in this indictment is the democratic right to membership in, and the legal existence of, the Communist Party. With every ounce of energy we must guarantee that the monopolists shall not have their way.

Our Party has shown a capacity to fight relentlessly and has proved that it can defend the rights of the American workers and people. However, we should note and correct certain shortcomings in our defense work up to now.

It was correct to guard against submerging the Party in defense work. It was not correct to neglect, as was the case at times, the defense of the Party and to fail to give this defense a mass character. Thus, for example, the successful mass struggle around the hunger strike must be contrasted to the failure of the Party to develop a sustained mass campaign in the Dennis and ’Josephson cases, or around the deportation cases involving numerous other members.

It was correct to call for the defense of the democratic rights of Communists on the broad issue of civil liberties; but it was not correct to gloss over, as was sometimes done, the vanguard role of the Party and to fail to explain to the masses why our Party is a special target for reaction in its drive toward war and fascism. We must convince the American people that it is precisely the Communists who must be defended—because the Communists are the best fighters for the immediate interests of the workers and all the common people, precisely because we are the Party of socialism.

It is correct to put up the best legal defense of the Party and its leadership. But it is also necessary to combat legalistic illusions which still exist. We must never allow legal defense to become a substitute for mass activity.

The Need of a Policy of Industrial Concentration

In spite of many hardships and difficulties since the Emergency Convention, we were able to make some important advances in the strengthening and building of our Party.

Under Browder the entire Party was organized primarily in 800 community clubs. Now we have approximately 3,000 clubs. In addition to 1,700 community clubs we have 309 shop, 425 industrial clubs as well as 200 professional and 200 student and youth clubs.

Our Party has 300 sections organized in 32 districts, 8 of which are new. The Party is organized in 600 cities, towns, and rural communities. During the three-year period since the Emergency Convention, our Party has grown from a membership of 52,824 to over 60,000. We now have a Party in seven Southern states. Of all the Party Districts, New York, California and Connecticut have shown the most consistent growth.

We all realize that this growth is inadequate. Not only inadequate in general, but above all in the light of the big tasks and responsibilities that our Party faces. This is why we have to examine critically all our work, determine what are the weaknesses and how to overcome them. Central to this task is the thorough examination of the results of our industrial concentration policy in order to draw the necessary lessons from this phase of our work. In this connection we can make the following section of the Main Resolution the starting point for this analysis.

For the American working class to advance to leadership of the developing people’s democratic coalition, and for the coalition itself to become a power for victory, there must be a growing and influential Communist Party.

Only a Communist Party of mass strength and influence, and functioning as an organized and inseparable part of the people’s coalition, can effectively promote the struggle for working-class leadership in the nation. Without such a Communist Party, this struggle cannot be won. In the course of daily and resolute struggle for working-class leadership in the progressive movements of the American people for peace and progress, for the defense of their vital interests, a mass Communist Party of great strength and influence must and will become a reality in the United States.

We must build our Party along these lines—politically, ideologically, and organizationally. It must be built daily in the realization of the Party’s vanguard role in the working class and among the people as a whole. It must be built, in the first place, among the basic industrial workers by a consistent, unflagging policy of concentration. The Party must be built in the struggle for its Marxist-Leninist principles and policies.

In examining the composition of our Party, the following factors must be noted: In the last three years, the industrial composition of our Party has increased only slightly. At present 51 percent of our members are industrial workers, and of these, 11 percent are at present unemployed.

At the same time, our trade-union membership in the last three years shows a decline from 46 percent to 44 percent; 28 percent belong to various C.I.O. unions; 13 1/2 percent are in the A.F. of L. and 24 percent in independent unions. Approximately 7 percent of our industrial workers are not members of any unions.

We get the following picture insofar as the basic industries are concerned: Of our employed membership, 18 1/2 percent are to be found in basic industry. Over the past three years the numerical growth of our Party in basic industry has shown no fundamental change. In the main our Party membership has remained static in such industries as steel, auto, rubber, and maritime. In some industries we have shown a slight growth, even though in some case it is unstable, as in electrical, coal mining, packing, longshore, and the building trades. In certain industries we have suffered a serious loss. In some cases this was due to a decline in production, as in shipbuilding. However, this was not the reason for the decline in the railroad and textile industries.

We must take note at this Convention that in the main industrial concentration states, with the exception of Ohio, we show a decline in membership. This is true of Illinois, Michigan, and Western Pennsylvania.

The mere presentation of this brief picture poses two questions: What is the cause of this situation, and how shall we proceed quickly to overcome it? To avoid repetition, we shall try to answer both questions simultaneously.

The central task before the Party is the fight for shifting the main base of our Party to the working class. This cannot be done unless we turn the face of the entire Party to the workers in the factories. There is already a new awareness in our entire Party of this urgent task. Every single state convention, and scores of comrades in the pre-Convention discussion, have given major attention to this question. We must transform this new awareness into deeds.

How to Apply the Concentration Policy

What is the essence of a concentration policy?

First of all, it requires a fundamental understanding of the role of the workers in the basic industries, in relation to the working class and the life of the country as a whole. It is precisely these workers employed in the huge plants by the tens of thousands who, as Lenin pointed out, become educated to understand the need for unity, collective action and solidarity by the very process of large-scale production itself. One cannot conceive of successfully building the Progressive Party, of organizing an effective fight against the Draft, or in defense of civil liberties, a successful fight against war and fascism, unless this section of the working class is fully mobilized. And, of course, one cannot speak of winning the American workers for Socialism without winning the majority of this section of the working class. It is necessary to permeate the entire Party with this consciousness.

Secondly, such a policy requires the selection of the points of concentration where a base must be secured, if we are to set in motion the entire labor movement. This means knowing which districts must be given major national attention, which industries are key and what plants are decisive. Concretely, while we must strengthen our base in all industrial states, we must above all shift our main emphasis to such states as Illinois, Ohio, and Michigan and to Western Pennsylvania. While we must strengthen the Party in all basic industries, we must particularly select for major concentration such industries as steel, auto, mining, maritime, electrical and railroad. Within these industries we must pursue a policy of concentration in key industrial towns and key plants and departments—with special consideration to the most underpaid sections of the workers, the unskilled and semiskilled. In some districts additional industries may be selected, as for instance textile in the South and New England; in Ohio rubber, in addition to steel and mining, etc.

Thirdly, the full mobilization of the Party is required to achieve the objectives of our concentration policy. Concretely, this means that all Party clubs must have a share in the responsibility for work at the concentration points. Communists in the mass organizations, trade unions, etc., should try to convince these organizations similarly to pursue a concentration policy.

Fourthly, beginning with the national and state leaderships, the entire Party must be involved in planning, guiding, and assuming systematic control and check-up of concentration objectives. All political and organizational problems must be discussed and reviewed from the standpoint of how to realize them in concentration industries. Systematic discussion of the problems in concentration industries must be organized in the top political bodies of the Party. Our leadership must be unsparing in the allocation of capable forces, finances, literature, and other material assistance.

Have we said some of these things before? We have. In fact, at our Emergency Convention three years ago the need for applying a consistent concentration policy was placed as a central objective. Why is it that we did not realize all of the objectives set for ourselves nationally and in the states?

It is not due to the fact that we did not select the key states, industries, shops and towns. In fact, some of our most capable comrades were assigned to these key districts, national coordinators were assigned to key industries, and many leading returned veterans were sent into a number of industrial towns.

We must frankly say that the failure to secure adequate results in our concentration work in the last three years is due, in the main, to an underestimation in practice of the vanguard role of the Party. In practice we concerned ourselves much more with specific policy and tactical questions of the unions, of relationship to top bodies, rather than to questions of building a base below to insure correct policies and tactics. What was incorrect? The separation of the building of the Party from the solution of questions of policy! What must not be forgotten is that it is not enough to have a correct policy in the industries, but in addition the organized strength of the Party must be thrown into the key points of concentration. From now on a drastic change must be made. Questions of policy and tactical line must always be related to the forces required to carry out the policy. This will demand a systematic and constant political check-up of our strength in the concentration areas: first, by the political bodies of the Party; and, secondly, through greater coordination of all departments and, most important, a fusion of the work of trade-union and organizational personnel.

The realization of the objectives of our concentration policy demands:

1. Developing and testing in life a correct policy for each industry.

2. Developing the united front from below to insure the carrying through of such a policy.

3. Drawing constant lessons from the experiences of the workers in the course of their struggles, thus helping to develop their class consciousness.

4. Systematically building the Party, by bringing into its ranks the most militant and advanced workers.

In the period immediately after this Convention the national and state leadership of our Party must work out the specific tasks of concentration which are to be carried out between now and the end of the year, and which should be checked at regular intervals by leading political bodies—a procedure which must be regularized and made a permanent feature of our work. Among these tasks, in addition to those mentioned, should be the following:

1. To review and allocate additional forces to provide leadership to work in the concentration industries.

2. To convince a selected number of comrades now employed in light industries, and from among white-collar and professional workers, veterans, and students—men and women—to secure work in basic industry.

3. To seek to influence key national groups, whose members are employed in concentration points, to direct their main emphasis to these industries.

4. To ensure the more effective utilization of the Daily Worker and the Worker in the concentration industries. In this connection, we must guarantee that the Daily Worker and the Worker secure and print material reflecting problems in these industries, and that the most consistent effort be made to .increase their circulation.

5. To improve the mass propaganda work of the Party in these industries through the medium of leaflets, pamphlets, and shop gate meetings. Especially important is the use of our numerous pamphlets for mass sale and distribution.

6. To institute a consistent policy of training and developing forces at the concentration points through political discussions, lectures, study groups, and schools.

The Party Club and Concentration

If we are to achieve these objectives, our attention has to be turned first of all to the Party clubs, and particularly to the shop and industrial clubs.

These clubs constitute the link between the Party and the basic industrial workers. It is through them that we shall be able to mobilize the workers to resist the drive of monopoly capitalism against their living standards and their trade unions, to resist the drive toward war and fascism. This means that a correct policy of concentration requires that the entire leadership concern itself with the problem of improving qualitatively the work of the shop and industrial clubs in general, and of the individual members in particular.

If these clubs are to be able to play their rightful role, the entire level of our theoretical and political work has to be raised. If these clubs are to reflect in the shops and industries the vanguard role of the Party, we must assist them to become the policy-making bodies within the shops and industries, firmly grounded in the knowledge of Marxism-Leninism. It is only in the struggle to realize such an objective that the clubs and individual members will be able to play the leading role in the development of the united front on a de­partmental, shop and industry level. Through such methods these clubs will be able to work with, and give leadership to, broad sections o£ the workers in the struggle for the defense of their economic needs and to spur the workers to independent political action and class consciousness. More and more workers will thus come to realize the class nature and role of the state, the crisis in the two-party system, the harmful role of Social-Democracy and the reformist trade-union bureaucrats, the need for becoming fully involved in the development of the Progressive Party, etc.

Our Party must take full advantage of every opportunity in the day-to-day struggles to champion and advance the fundamental interests of our class, thus demonstrating that:

“The Communists fight for the attainment of the immediate aims, for the enforcement of the momentary interests of the working class; but in the movement of the present, they also represent and take care of the future of that movement.”[1]

Current developments in the labor movement indicate the readiness of the workers for political as well as economic struggle. For example, there is the recent gathering of 500 activists, including presidents and members of Executive Boards of UA.W. locals, which endorsed Wallace and the Progressive Party. Despite the position of the John L. Lewis leadership, important groups of the miners are rallying to Wallace. In the steel industry significant changes are already taking place as the steel workers help to put the new party on the ballot. In Gary, thousands of steel workers turned out to hear Wallace.

Our Party must help to develop further this new initiative, and boldly promote united struggles to speed all positive developments which can bring about a new relationship of forces among the workers; we must build our Party as a force that can help bring about this change in the shortest time.

While we must struggle for this Marxist-Leninist concept of the role of the Party shop club, unfortunately only 25 percent of our industrial members are in shop and industrial clubs. While we have successfully established shop clubs in many of the large plants, there are still too many decisive plants where we have no shop clubs. Even in some of the large plants where we have established shop clubs, we find that in some of the key departments we are still isolated from the workers. The industrial clubs, which were established in most places to serve as a form of organization transitional to the establishment of shop clubs, have instead become a frozen form of organization. There is a reluctance in too many places to release comrades who are now attached to community clubs, but who rightfully belong in shop branches, the argument being given that this would weaken the community club. While we appreci­ate the needs of, and the problems faced by, our community clubs, once our basic concentration policy becomes clear; we should overcome all hesitations to shifting every comrade who should be in it to a shop club. At the same time, we must find the methods whereby the comrades in the shop clubs can play an important role in the struggles of the communities in which they live.

Unfortunately, due to unclarity on the role of the shop clubs and inadequate attention to them, we find that many have a tendency to concern themselves almost exclusively with trade union questions—and this, on a trade-union level—failing to grasp their role of vanguard political organization. Under such conditions, harmful tendencies develop; expressed in a reliance on the spontaneity of the workers, a failure to promote the class consciousness of the workers, and an inadequate building of our press. All this results in a situation in which our Party in many instances tail-ends behind the workers.

An Example of Correct Work

Let me give an example of the correct work of an individual Communist and his club, whose very fruitful experiences are worthy of study by this Convention:

I want to relate the experiences of Nick Migas, a steel worker from Indiana Harbor, a member of the National Committee of our Party.

Nick works in a plant employing 10,000 workers. Because of his role and leadership in the fight for the defense of the workers’ needs in his department, he was elected as the Department Grievance Committeeman, in spite of the most vicious Red-baiting threats, and intimidation by the leadership of this Right-wing union.

Comrade Nick accepted the challenge in true Communist fashion. He attends his Party club meetings, he discusses his problems at the club meetings, and the entire club works out collectively how he and other members can conduct a more effective struggle in the interests of the workers. Through his effort, together with that of other progressives in his local union, and despite many obstacles and difficulties, thirteen out of fifteen progressives, including Nick, were elected to the local’s Executive Committee. Nick and other progressives while defending the economic interests of the workers, helped also to create a Wallace Committee which hundreds of workers from the plant joined.

During the recent round of wage struggles the international leadership of the steelworkers’ union said that it was impossible to obtain wage increases in 1948. But Nick Migas, by applying a correct policy of the united front from below, raised this issue in his local and was elected with other progressives to his international union convention. You all know what happened at that convention and of the brave and honorable role that Nick played. After the convention, the workers in basic steel were granted wage increases. In all modesty we can say that Nick and his colleagues played no small role in winning an increase in wages of $450,000 a day for the workers in basic steel. This means an annual increase of $135,000,000. No wonder that the big trusts hate the Communists! Just imagine what it would mean for the American working class and our Party if in one hundred key plants in the country, we could train our shop clubs and individual members to become Nick Migases. This can be done! It must be done! Therefore, we must undertake in all seriousness to strengthen existing shop clubs and build new ones in the light of this example. There are undoubtedly other examples, and I hope that the comrades will relate them in the discussion.

The Community Club

I am sure that our entire Party will greet this emphasis on developing a concentration policy for the building up of our shop and industrial clubs. This in no way detracts from the urgent need to strengthen and build our community clubs. The objectives we set in concentration can be realized only if we successfully assist the community clubs in orienting their work toward the shops. The vital role of the community clubs is not lessened but becomes of even greater importance in the light of the industrial concentration approach we are attempting to establish.

We have innumerable examples of the splendid mass work of our clubs in developing struggles around such issues as high prices and rents, Negro discrimination, in defense of Israel, to repeal the draft, and a score of other local and national issues. These clubs in the main have been the builders of our press and distributors of our literature. These types of activity must be strengthened in every way. But now it must be pointed in the first place to the big shops and working-class communities. The example of these clubs could be multiplied manifold. Other comrades will give other examples. But what is missing is the fact that such splendid activity is not directed toward united action with workers in the plants and shops. The fight to solve this problem is the fight for a policy of working-class leadership of the entire people.

From the point of view of improving the content and quality of our concentration work, the group system deserves major attention. The groups must become a basic link in our work among the masses. The groups provide a medium which not only gives us greater mobility but a form through which we can give greater attention to the individual problems of our members—their education and personal development, their adjustment to Party life, so that they may grow as Communists and enhance their contribution. Sometimes we overlook the shy and retiring members and take little interest in their personal problems—and the result is that many become inactive. The group, in addition to its educational and political mass work, must become the creator of warmth, understanding, and comradeship among our members. Such an approach will help increase attendance and establish closer ties with our members, increase dues payments, increase the circulation of the Daily Worker and the Worker, bring higher sales of our literature, and involve more of our members in Party activities.

What Kind of Party are we Building?

In the coming days we shall witness an increase in the enemy attacks against our Party, but we shall also witness an ascending wave of mass struggles. Our Party must take all the necessary steps to strengthen itself speedily in order to be able to help lead these struggles. We should therefore, while taking a realistic view of the situation, act with the firm conviction that we can win this fight.

Some comrades conclude that under conditions of monopoly’s offensive and the defensive battles of the working class “we must retrench” and “wait for more favorable times” for Party building, or that “we need to limit the Party membership to the most militant activists within the vanguard Party.” In the light of the tasks facing us as Communists, can we accept this “theory”? Obviously not! Those who advance this “theory” fail to see that the “more favorable times” of tomorrow are being determined, and can be determined only by what we do in today’s struggles. In a period of reactionary offensive, favorable opportunities cannot be created by a “wait and see” policy, by “retrenchment” or by “limiting the Party membership to the most militant activists.”

The concept of “retrenchment” is not a line of struggle; it is a retreat. This concept flows from a one-sided estimate of the situation in the country. Comrades who defend such concepts fail to see the emerging struggles and the militant cadres they will bring to the fore. The place of many of these cadres should be in the Communist Party. Our day-to-day struggles must be designed to reach and win them and the Leftward moving masses.

Their one-sided estimate of the situation leads these comrades to overestimate the strength of the enemy and underestimate the fighting moods of the masses, as well as the ability of our Party to influence the course of the developing struggles. This “theory” denies the vanguard role of our Party and is in essence a form of liquidationism. The present offensive of monopoly is not an argument against, but an argument for building the Communist Party. We must reject all counsels of retreat and retrenchment.

Other comrades conclude that the best way to meet reaction’s offensive is by submerging the Party in the mass movement. In practice this concept would lead to a state of affairs in which the Party becomes identical with the trade union or mass organization. These comrades see the need for work among the masses, but they do not clearly see the need for the vanguard Party of the working class. In reverse form they express a certain timidity and a fear of the masses. Moreover, their conception tends to create a tailist policy, and not a policy of leadership which aims to instill class consciousness, pride in, and direction to, the working-class and people’s movement. Instead of following a conscious and consistent policy of leadership, these comrades tend to rely on spontaneity. Here again we have an overestimation of the strength of the enemy and an underestimation of the ability of the masses to fight back effectively under the leadership of the Party. This conception likewise denies the vanguard role of the Party.

Nor is the problem resolved by establishing two types of Communists—one doing “mass” work and submerging the Party among the masses, and the other doing “Communist” work and moving independently of the masses. This division is fundamentally wrong and solves nothing. This combination of Leftist-sectarianism and Right opportunism stands in opposition to the Marxist-Leninist principle of Party organization. Comrades given to such thinking fail to see that the starting point of all Communist work is mass work that the Party can be built only through such activity.

Nor will the “go it alone” “theory,” which draws sectarian conclusions from the independent role of the Party, solve anything. Clearly, strengthening the Party to play its vanguard role in the working-class and people’s movement requires a clear understanding of what we mean by its vanguard role. The vanguard Party is not separated, from the masses. It is integrally linked with them, leading and helping them to move forward. We ourselves have the task of making clear to the masses our Party’s oneness with them. We must show them that the Party is the most advanced section of the most progressive and advanced class. We cannot convince the people of our vanguard role just by talking about it. We can convince them only by helping to increase the fighting capacity of the people at all levels of struggle. This we can do only by increasing our own fighting capacity, and by improving the quality of leadership we give to the mass movement on the basis of our scientific understanding. Our task is to grasp all opportunities to help build the united front of struggle in the shops, in the working-class neighborhoods, to build the Progressive Party and every democratic movement, and thus to fight to build our Party as the indispensable instrument for beating back the offensive of reaction, fascism and war.

In the further building of our Party, we must also pay considerable attention to the need of substantially lowering the age level of the Party by recruiting large numbers of young people. Here it is worth noting that in the past several years we have made some progress in this direction. We have more than doubled our membership among World War II veterans. We have established a foothold among students on 95 campuses. We have recruited young people generally through the existing youth clubs. But we cannot be satisfied with these results. In fact, we must state that we are seriously lagging on this front.

There is a great stirring among the youth, who are the first to be hit by Wall Street’s drive toward war and fascism. Reaction is leaving no stone unturned to win the youth for its reactionary program. There are numerous instances indicating that reactionary forces have been able to misdirect the youth (as, for instance, in some unions, in inspiring hoodlum acts, etc.), because of the absence of decisive leadership in the fight for the youth. Hence, our Party must not only considerably intensify its activity among the youth, particularly among the young workers in industry and among the youth in the Negro communities, but we must place as a central task the recruiting of substantial numbers of young Americans into our ranks in the coming months.

Our Party in the Struggle for Negro Rights

In challenging monopoly oppression, the working class finds a powerful ally in the Negro people who, by the very nature of their position in American life, are rallying to the banners of the struggle against Wall Street. Success in the struggle against monopoly requires the forging of the alliance of labor and the Negro people, the building of the Negro people’s unity and the building of our Party, the consistent champion of the Negro people’s struggle. For without our Party such an alliance cannot grow and permanently exist. In this connection, we should take note of the following passage from the Draft Resolution:

“The intensified attacks upon the Negro people demonstrate clearly the growth of imperialist reaction and national oppression in the United States. The Negro people are experiencing the most extreme, the most brutal manifestations of the growing fascist danger, especially in the South.”

It would be a most fatal error on the part of labor if it failed to see that this attack is an attempt to tear asunder the growing alliance of the workers and the Negro people, and thus to destroy the labor movement itself. Participation in the fight for the equal rights of the Negro people is an indispensable duty for the American working class, and essential to the maintenance and extension of democracy. Hence the necessity for unfolding an energetic struggle for the equal rights of the Negro people; for the outlawing of Jim Crow and the passage of the anti-lynching and anti-poll tax legislation for the abolition of all forms of discrimination against the Negro people in army and civilian life; for democratic agrarian reforms in the South, satisfying the needs of the Negro people for land, freedom, and equality; for the right to self-determination of the Negro people in the Black Belt.

The Draft Resolution calls upon the Party to make the demand for full economic, political and social equality, a demand which corresponds to the class interests of the workers, a demand which should become the battle cry of the entire labor movement.

Thus, our Party must keep in view the aim of making a radical turn in the direction of unleashing the full potential of the Negro liberation movement and building our Party as the proven leader of the Negro workers and the Negro people. This is an undertaking that we accept with honor.

Our Party since the Emergency Convention has conducted many significant struggles for Negro rights: anti-lynch, anti-poll tax, for F.E.P.C. legislation, against restrictive covenants, against discrimination in the armed services, in defense of the Ingrams, etc. Nevertheless, these struggles have developed unevenly, and in many cases sporadically.

The basic weakness in the fight for the rights of the Negro people is the failure to tackle the basic problem of which the other issues are but a reflection. I have in mind the fight on the job against discriminatory firings and layoffs of Negro workers, against the refusal of many companies, including many in the basic industries, to hire Negro workers; and against the refusal of many plants to upgrade Negro workers, and of unions to promote them as shop stewards, committeemen and leaders. Only here and there can we record notable exceptions.

While we re-established our Party in the South, we do not yet have an operative policy of attacking the very basis of Negro oppression on the land. What does this mean? It means that while we must continue to strengthen and further develop in every way the struggles already begun, we must likewise direct our attention to the solution of the fundamental economic and social problems which will give basic substance to the fight of our class, and real equality to the Negro people.

The failure of the labor movement to conduct a consistent struggle for the vital interests of the Negro people is due to the fact that it still lacks an understanding of the Negro question. This means at the same time that, in failing to forge an effective labor-Negro alliance, the working class is failing to defend its own class interests. In such a situation, enormous obligations are placed upon the working-class vanguard.

The Negro workers in the trade-union movement are in revolt against the Social-Democratic do-nothing policy on the issue of job inequality. But the majority of the white workers, due to the influence of bourgeois ideology in the labor movement, have not yet come forward in solidarity with the Negro workers on this vital issue. In many cases, even among progressives in the trade unions, there is a negative approach to this burning issue of Negro job inequality. The result is that the white workers are not helped to understand what this revolt means to labor as a whole. Neither are the Negro workers helped to appreciate more fully the need for class solidarity.

Meanwhile, the bourgeoisie asserts itself as never before, trying to head off class solidarity and win the Negro workers to its banners. The monopolists make full use of Social-Democratic labor leaders, as well as of some Negro leaders who spread the slogan: “Neither Jim Crow nor Communism.” Left-progressive unionists will unwittingly help those who seek to weaken and undermine the unions, unless they overcome existing weaknesses in their fight for full equality.

It is important for us to understand that, as the offensive of the monopolists increases against labor, the class-collaborationist moves away from the defense of labor’s interests in general and those of the Negro workers in particular.

The problem of discrimination against Negro people in the basic industries is not limited to Negro industrial workers. One of the worst forms of discrimination is to be found in the general offices. The general offices of the steel, auto, mining, maritime, electrical, railroad, public utilities and a host of other trusts, refuse to hire Negro men and women. These offices remain “lily white.” Clearly, we cannot ignore this situation any longer. It is another example of the attempt to split the working class from the Negro people and create divisions also within the Negro people themselves.

We must recognize the fact that weaknesses on this front of struggle are due to the existence of white chauvinism, expressed in policy and practice. The phrase, “We’re all equal,” equates formalistically the problems of Negro workers with those of all exploited and oppressed. Supporting F.E.P.C. by resolution alone is a means of avoiding the concrete fight against inequality in the departments, shops and plants. This we all know. The failure effectively to combat this kind of hidden white chauvinism, expresses a lack of faith in the white workers. The white workers will rally, if convinced that their own interests are at stake in the fight for Negro rights.

The Party must unfold an energetic struggle against white chauvinism, not only in the realm of ideology, but also in a practical fight for equality on every level. The result will be that greater numbers of white workers will enlist in the fight and Negro workers will become more active participants and builders of the union. In addition, they will become a leading force in the Negro communities, and our Party will grow more rapidly among Negro and white workers.

I do not propose to deal with the problems of the South, since they will be dealt with in a special report before this Convention. I want, however, to deal briefly with several problems of the Negro community itself.

The Negro communities are highly organized and progressive and have, in the last decade or so, always been found in their majority in the progressive column on all the basic issues. However, one of the major weaknesses from which the Negro communities still suffer is to be found in the totally inadequate position of leadership that the Negro workers have won and assumed within the Negro community. Until basic progress is made in this respect, the Negro community cannot play its full role in the struggle for the interests of the Negro people and within the general people’s coalition for peace, democracy, and progress. But progress in the solution of this question is to a large degree dependent on the unfolding of the struggle for full and equal rights of the Negro workers in each factory, in each industry, and in each trade union. Thus, the fight by our Party forces, and by the progressive forces in general within the labor movement, for equality for the Negro workers is the key to the solution of almost all questions within the Negro community.

Undoubtedly, our Party generally enjoys greater influence and support among the Negro people than among any other group. This has been shown on innumerable occasions when the Negro workers rallied to the support, not only of Negro Communist leaders but of our Party as a whole. But it is also true that there exists a very wide gap between this general support and influence and the numerical growth and stability of our Party in the Negro community. Why is this so? To answer this question we must take note of some of the basic weaknesses in the work of our Party, which contribute to this situation.

In the first place, we quite often raise slogans and develop movements on such issues as the fight against high prices, for rent control, more adequate recreational, health and hospital facilities, against police brutality, and against discrimination and inequality in whatever forms they are expressed. The Negro people readily join with us in this fight. But it is also true that we do not always carry on a consistent and sustained fight on these issues and that we allow various reformist and Social-Democratic groups to take advantage of this inconsistency and thus take over leadership of such movements. Such a situation is also made possible by the fact that we do not always expose those petty-bourgeois and reformist leaders who are out to mislead and behead the Negro people’s movement and because we do not give sufficient attention to showing the Negro people in practice, through struggle and through consistent education, the difference between a reformist class-collaboration policy and a policy of struggle. In a certain sense it might almost be said that, because of the readiness of the Negro people to struggle and the ease with which they can be led into struggle, we often, instead of utilizing these very positive factors, tend to rely on spontaneity and thus tend to lag behind the masses. Here again, the assumption by the Negro workers of leadership in the Negro community is essential to overcome this weakness and to guarantee a consistent and persistent development of the struggle.

Finally, we must say that any weakening of the fight against white-chauvinist tendencies within the ranks of the Party, whether manifested in the Negro community, in the Party as a whole, or in the labor and people’s movement generally, is one of the greatest obstacles to the steady, advancement and consolidation of the Negro people’s movement within the Negro community and to the building of our Party into a mass Party in the Negro community. The very influence and respect that the Party has won among the Negro people makes them most sensitive to any failures on our part. They rightly demand of us more than of anyone else. They use a different yardstick in measuring us than in measuring anyone else.

By fighting for equal rights for the Negro workers within the labor movement, by a consistent policy of struggle for the rights of the Negro people in the community, by advancing resolutely the leadership of the Negro workers in the Negro community, by an effective exposure of the reformist and Social-Democratic misleaders, by an uncompromising struggle against every manifestation of white chauvinism, our Party can quickly overcome the gap between its general influence and its organizational weaknesses and establish itself as a major force among the Negro people.

For a Consistent Cadre Policy

We Communists are fully conscious of our tasks; and, in all modesty recognize that on us devolves the political leadership to the working class for shaping the future of our country. Our Party needs men and women from the ranks of the working class capable of accomplishing great tasks. For, as Stalin says: “Once the political line has been established, cadres decide everything.” To reach our objectives, we need to develop a consistent cadre policy. This means, not only the training and development of cadres as full-time functionaries, but, in the first place, a wide corps of non-full time activists with daily ties among the masses in the shops and working-class communities. Such a Communist cadre policy should strive to develop workers with indigenous ties, whether in the shop, plant, community, or mass organizations. This guide applies to clubs, sections and counties, as well as to the districts. In the present political situation, the qualities of our cadres will in great part decide the issue of the struggle. An undertaking of such importance cannot be solved by any particular department. It must become the task of the entire Party.

The essence of a correct cadre policy is the training and development of men and women who have faith and confidence in their class, have love for, and pride in, their class; are militant fighters, enjoying the confidence of the workers and our membership, and unreservedly accept the policies and principles of our Marxist-Leninist program.

They must be men and women who are not only known inside the Party but who have live contact with non-Party masses. They must be men and women who, having fullest confidence in our Party’s policies, fight for their realization among the masses in general and the workers in particular.

What kind of cadres does the vanguard party need and how should we select cadres? Comrade Dimitrov gives the answer in his celebrated report to the Seventh World Congress of the Communist International, in 1935:

“First, absolute devotion to the cause of the working class, loyalty to the Party, tested in face of the enemy—in battle, in prison, in court.

“Second, the closest possible contact with the masses. The comrades concerned must be wholly absorbed in the interests of the masses, feel the life pulse of the masses, know their sentiments and requirements. The prestige of the leaders of our Party organization should be based, first of all, on the fact that the masses regard them as their leaders and are convinced through their own experience of their ability as leaders, and of their determination and self-sacrifice in struggle.

“Third, ability independently to find one’s bearings and not to be afraid of assuming responsibility in making decisions. He who fears to take responsibility is not a leader. He who is unable to display initiative, who says: ‘I will do only what I am told,’ is not a Bolshevik. Only he is a real Bolshevik leader who does not lose his head at moments of defeat, who does not get a swelled head at moments of success, who displays indomitable firmness in carrying out decisions. Cadres develop and grow best when they are placed in the position of having to solve concrete problems of the struggle independently and are aware that they are fully responsible for their decisions.

“Fourth, discipline and Bolshevik hardening in the struggle against the class enemy as well as in their irreconcilable opposition to all deviations from the Bolshevik line.”[2]

As can be seen, the ability to speak well and write well, while important elements in the struggle, are not the main criteria for the selection and bold promotion of working-class cadres in the Communist Party.

In fighting for such a cadre policy, our Party, in working out the solution to this decisive question, must take into account the fact that our cadres entered the Party at different periods—some, during the unemployed struggles; others, during the period of the democratic front; many, during the revisionist period; while many are joining today. In many cases the imprint of the period in which they joined remains with them. What does this mean? This means that our cadre policy must be designed to educate and re-educate our membership to understand the policies of our Party in the past, its history, but really to master our present-day policies and tactics.

On the other hand, the fight for a correct cadre policy also means that we take into account the fact that a few comrades who were outstanding Party leaders in the past now feel that the intensity of the struggle is too great, that they can take a back seat. There are a few who strive to move away from their proletarian base and origin and seek satisfaction in business outlets. There are some who balk at leaving the “comfort” of the big metropolitan cities for work among the masses in other industrial towns. There are some who have lost perspective under conditions of monopoly’s offensive, lack faith in the working class and consequently in the ability of the Party to rally the masses for a successful struggle. There are a few comrades in this category who also sit on the side lines. They are waiting for the leadership to make mistakes. They do not contribute to the struggle. But in all such cases history passes such comrades by. Is it not clear that such comrades cannot inspire confidence among the masses? Is it not clear that these comrades must either change their outlook or become sympathizers of the working-class struggles? It is equally clear that what the working class needs is more than sympathizers in those to whom it has a right to look for leadership. To the extent that our Party tackles this question, to that extent will it more rapidly embrace in its ranks such militant Communist leaders. This approach will enable us to put up an effective fight for the political line of our Party.

We must know our people, their qualities, difficulties and weaknesses, attitudes and tastes. Such knowledge will come from the course of the struggle itself; for struggles form and mold cadres. Schools and classes, which are also a form of struggle for cadres, constitute a basic auxiliary to the realization of the full potential of every individual. I repeat, we must pursue a bold policy of promotion of leading and active workers in every phase of activity.

We must be ever vigilant to the attempts of the class enemy to penetrate our ranks. This requires opening up a constant and consistent struggle against enemy influences and practices. In one district a stoolpigeon was a member of the District Committee for several years and was discovered only by accident. Is it not worth pondering over the question that too few of the enemy elements have been exposed in recent years?

Our Party has made the beginnings since the Emergency Convention in raising the theoretical level of the membership—through schools and classes, lectures and study circles, and an increase in the publication of the classics of our movement. Comrade Foster is leading the fight on this front. But what has been done is far from adequate in the light of the tasks we face. Thus, the all-around improvement of all our theoretical work is indispensable in the training and development of cadres. The importance of this entire question can be fully appreciated if we look at the composition of our leadership in the districts, counties and sections. The weaknesses that exist in terms of boldly promoting workers to operative leadership are due in the main to the fact that we are not fully conscious in our everyday work of the imperative need of tackling this problem. There exists in too many places a certain lack of patience in developing workers who are not so articulate. We promote them only when they are the full-fledged, finished product. This is obviously wrong. Our Party, to realize its aims, needs forces for basic industrial towns. America is a big country—and between Chicago and California there exists practically virgin territory for our Party’s work. We must build our Party here.

But in the quest for forces to solve this problem, the answer is often given that we have no forces. To this I give the reply of Lenin who in a similar situation replied:

“There are plenty of people, and yet we are short of people—this contradictory formula has long defined the contradictions in the organizational life and organizational requirements of Social-Democracy. And now this contradiction stands out with particular force; from all sides we often hear passionate appeals for new forces, complaints of the shortage of people in the organizations, and equally often and everywhere we have enormous offers of service, a growth of young forces, particularly in the working class. The practical organizer who complains of a shortage of people under such circumstances becomes the victim of the illusion from which Madame Roland suffered, during the period of the highest stage of development of the Great French Revolution, when she said in 1793: there are no men in France, we are surrounded by pigmies. Those who talk like this fail to see the wood for the trees; they confess that they are blinded by events; that it is not they, the revolutionaries, who control events in mind and activity, but that events control them and have overwhelmed them. Such organizers had better retire and leave the field clear for younger forces whose zeal may often compensate for lack of experience.”

There is no doubt that we will tackle this problem in the spirit that is required. Our Party is capable of accomplishing great things. We can do this because our Party’s policies are based on the science of Marxism-Leninism. Our Party will accomplish its objectives because in the fight to realize its line among the masses it will develop as a system in its work the Bolshevik weapon of criticism and self-criticism. And if we are able to lay bare our major weaknesses for discussion, it is due to the fact that we have every confidence that we can overcome them and strengthen every positive aspect in our Party’s work. The weapon of criticism and self-criticism is the sign of strength of a growing and maturing Communist Party under conditions of the sharpening monopoly offensive. We can look back with pride to our Emergency Convention’s action in rejecting Browder’s revisionism, which action restored to the Party at the same time the Leninist concept of democratic centralism. This Leninist principle of democratic centralism combines two concepts, which enables us to verify our policies and tactics among the masses and to strengthen the authority of Party leadership which resolutely defends the interests of the working class.

It was the application of this principle which enabled our Party to cleanse itself of such anti-Party and anti-working class elements as Browder, Darcy, Harrison George, Dunne, Vern Smith, and Franklin. The continued and energetic application of the principle is indispensable to a Communist Party fighting resolutely against bourgeois influences and practices which are alien to the spirit of working-class struggles. But to achieve this means to root out all petty-bourgeois concepts regarding Party democracy. We should once again return to the classics and refresh our understanding of democratic centralism, its need in the creation of a unified, monolithic Party which is so vital to our class today.

I should like to conclude with the closing section of the Draft Resolution:

“We live in stirring times, fraught with the most terrible dangers, but pregnant with unprecedented opportunities to advance toward the realization of mankind’s highest aspirations.

“As the vanguard Party of the American working class, we Communists have a heavy responsibility to our own people and to all the peace-loving peoples of the world.

“Only if our Party fulfills its vanguard obligations will the American working class succeed in leading the American people’s struggle to repel the dangers of war and fascism, and realize the objectives of peace, democracy, and social progress.

“We have confidence that our Communist Party will build itself, bigger and stronger, to measure up to the needs of our class and our country. We have confidence that the very fury of the coming storms will convince the best of the American workers to struggle with us, in our ranks.

“We will fight unflinchingly for the legality and constitutional rights of our Party. We do not shrink from the hammer blows of reaction. Under them we will steel our Party in Communist discipline, loyalty, and unity, develop its Marxist-Leninist understanding, and temper our cadres and leadership. Sharing the hardships and struggles of America’s working people; we will root our Party ever deeper in the American working-class soil from which it sprang. “As the vanguard Party of the American working class we take our place in the front line of battle, conscious of our responsibility to all Americans who struggle for peace, democracy, economic security, and social progress. We hold aloft the banner of our conviction that the American working people have the capacity, means, and allies to curb and defeat the fascists and warmongers, and, eventually, to advance toward the Socialist reorganization of society, which will forever end the dangers of fascism, crises, and war—the misery of exploitation and oppression. We face the oncoming struggles with confidence in our people, our class, and our Party.”

[1] Marx, Karl & Engels, Frederick, The Communist Manifesto; New Outlook Publishers: Seattle, 2022, p. 53.

[2] Dimitrov, Georgi, The United Front: The Struggle Against Fascism and War; New Outlook Publishers: Seattle, 2023, pp. 134-135.